January 25, 2007

Mediatti

We have around 7,000 people here on base sharing one lousy Internet company. If Mike wants to play a game online, I can't even pick up my email because otherwise he gets kicked. And the same place offers us the highest quality television using the most advanced equipment available. For just $40/month, they record channels in the states on DVDs and then play them over here.

Every once in a while, they forget to change the discs fast enough, and we wind up watching their DVD player's screen saver. Mike will come home to find me sitting in front of the tv staring at the screen saving yelling, "Don't go in there! No! NO! Nooooooooo!" and then I start weeping because I love this show.

I feel your pain, litterally. I live in base housing here on Kadena and have been getting bandwidth speeds of 50-70Kbps for the last 2 weeks(based on highest bandwidth results from the major testing sites). They advertise 1.5Mbps (20x more then what I get), so what am I doing wrong here? I cant even use my Vonage phone, much less play an online game or watch some streaming video. I've had Mediatti here since late '04 (shortly after they started providing for Kadena) and have never experienced speeds over 315Kbps, and that was at 3am on some glorious day last year. I really wish there was a better business bureau or something for military contractors. Could they at least have a minimum service requirement clause in the contract that stated that they have to at least make some effort to fix bandwidth problems? I'd love to hear any suggestions anyone might have as to some kind of action that can be taken to either curb the issues or draw attention to them from the right kinds of people.
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-We will always remember...

I'm fortunate enough to live on a Marine Base here in Oki, and we were able to dump Mediatti's sub-standard internet service. Konnect is over five times faster (4 Mbps) than what I was getting with Mediatti (600-700Kbps). Still no solution for the "Blue DVD screen of death" though. I guess we should be thankful; I know that putting the right DVD in the right machine is a highly technical process, much like launching the space shuttle...